A Michigan woman who fatally shot her husband, their two adult children, then turned the gun on herself in their home on Friday was driven to the point of no-return because she was shunned by her local Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall after she decided she wanted her children to attend college, her ...

The Rev. Billy Graham , the Christian evangelist whose worldwide crusades and role as adviser to decades of U.S. presidents made him one of the best known religious figures of his time, died Wednesday at age 99 at his home in Montreat, N.C, Todd Shearer of DeMoss Associates told Fox News.

“Someday you will read or hear that Billy Graham is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it. I shall be more alive than I am now. I will just have changed my address. I will have gone into the presence of God.”—Billy Graham

Christians today are facing more challenges than ever. The Poached Egg exists to equip Christians to meet those challenges and be more confident in their faith and become more effective witnesses for Christ. If you find these articles and posts useful, please consider partnering with me in 2018 to continue this work that God has laid on my heart. As someone once said, the Gospel is free, but someone has to pay for the plumbing. You can become a monthly partner for just as little as $5 a month (that’s only $60 a year), the price of a gourmet cup of coffee. Special one time gifts are welcome and encouraged as well. Will you help?

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Christians have always been extremely wary of holding anything, such as philosophy or “reason” or evidence, as an authority over Scripture. It is sometimes argued that if one appeals to something as a reason to believe Scripture, then that thing becomes one’s authority. But, for the Christian, nothing can stand in authority over Scripture. Thus, we cannot use reason and evidence as our basis for believing the claims of Scripture.

3. The gospel is public truth. Jesus died publicly. Showed himself alive publicly. And his Word is a public document. When we treat the gospel as public truth, our priorities transform to a position where we not only see the proclamation of Christ’s truth as imperative, but we also see the demonstration of His justice as significant. The reason why human injustice is not talked about much by many churches is that the gospel is not talked about by many churches.

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Definitive pronouncements about a person’s legacy are best left to future historians, but in the case of Billy Graham, certain reliable observations can be made now. As I both mourn his passing today, and rejoice that he is now with the Savior whom he deeply loved, I offer these reflections on his enduring legacy. These observations are not about the vast numerical impact of his evangelistic ministry (such as preaching to over 200 million people), but about his on-going legacy from which we can draw inspiration in our own lives and ministries today.

After preaching to millions in a career that spanned over sixty years, Billy Graham passed away on 21 Feb 2018 at the age of 99. We have compiled a variety of content in honour of one of the most important Christian leaders of the 20th century.

This is a rhetoric that many apologists use when confronting atheists. The idea is that since the atheist lacks evidence for his position, he needs more faith to make up the difference. But I think this portrays faith in a confusing and unhelpful way for three reasons.

Chuck Colson: "It turns out the man who witnessed to me, Tom Phillips, had been converted at a #BillyGraham Crusade in New York City in 1968... Phillips shared his faith with me at the darkest moment of my life... This is how the Gospel spreads, Graham to Phillips to Colson."

He was right. Media continues to get better and more vivid. CGI effects are becoming more moving. Movies more stunning. TV dramas more compelling. Actors more persuasive. “We’re going to have to come to some sort of understanding about how much we’re going to allow ourselves, because it’s probably going to get a lot more fun than real life.” He was speaking of TV, movies, gaming, and mass media, but even social media and the Internet, while democratizing voices, would not make our screens less addictive, and Wallace knew it.

Richard Dawkins, the famous English evolutionary biologist and renowned atheist, revived an objection related to God’s existence in his book, The God Delusion. In the fourth chapter (Why There Almost Certainly Is No God), Dawkins wrote, “…the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable.” In essence, Dawkins offered a restatement of the classic question, “Who created God?” On its face, this seems to be a reasonable question. Christians, after all, claim God created everything we see in our universe (all space, time and matter); He is the cause of our caused cosmos. Skeptics fail to see this as a satisfactory explanation, however, because it seems to beg the question, “If God, created the universe, who (or what) created God?”

The late Billy Graham preached the gospel to more live audiences than anyone in history—nearly 215 million individuals in more than 185 countries and territories http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2018/billy-graham/how-billy-graham-got-mainstream-media-spread-gods-good-news.html …

While working for The Chicago Tribune , atheist Lee Strobel put his skills to work as he examined the evidence for a historical Jesus. The conversion of his wife, Leslie, was his inspiration. His study, and his wife’s patient support, resulted in his own conversion to Christianity in 1981 — and his 1998 book, “ The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus .” Critics hailed Lee Strobel’s “bulldog-like tenacity” as he interviewed 13 religious scholars for the book.

(CNN) Evangelist Billy Graham -- a confidant to presidents, a guiding light to generations of American evangelicals and a globe-trotting preacher who converted millions to Christianity -- died Wednesday at the age of 99, his spokesman confirmed to CNN.

How do we know God exists? The go-to Sunday School answer is faith, but is that really a legitimate way to know? Is there any difference between having faith in the God of the Bible or faith in the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Is faith just choosing something to believe in even if there is no evidence or logic to prove it? These and similar questions are often posed as a challenge to Christianity. To answer these questions, I want to go behind these objections and begin by tackling the underlying question: how can we know anything? Many men and women have wrestled with this question throughout history. Generally speaking, responses can be lumped into one of three categories.

Fourth, Ecclesiastes must be understood within its genre. It is wisdom literature , along with Job and Proverbs. [ii] These books read differently than a Gospel or a letter of Paul. See for yourself. Wisdom literature gives us personal reflections rather than a systematic account of a subject. It is usually written in the form of poetry. Much is expressed in memorable proverbs or sayings, such as “the more words, the less meaning and how does it profit anyone? (Ecclesiastes 6:11)” and “better a live dog than a dead lion” (9:4). However, wisdom literature is never false or misleading. I simply must be read in the right way. For example, when the Preacher of Ecclesiastes says, “So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind: (2:19),” he is voicing part of his quest for wisdom. He is not advocating that everyone hate life! The Preacher is not done with his quest for wisdom. Ecclesiastes should be experienced within its proper genre. In fact, we should be glad that God revealed truth through so many genres.

Some good guidance here (please visit Daryl’s post for all the details). The most striking “tip” Daryl offered, however, was #4: Teach your children the Bible and about God. Who wouldn’t agree with this priority? For many of us, however, the challenge seems daunting. Do we know enough about the Bible to teach it to our children? What else do we need to know in order to effectively teach our children about God? Does this also involve making a case for God’s existence and answering the objections they will ultimately face from the culture? I think it does. Several years ago, Jon Nielson , the college pastor at College Church in Wheaton, Illinois wrote an article entitled, Why Youth Stay in Church When They Grow Up . Jon cited three important characteristics of college aged Christians who held on to their faith and were committed to their church family:

Pastors do you not see that it is your responsibility to adequately train the flock of God in reasons why the Gospel is true and reliable? It is not enough to preach a good sermon every week. People need opportunities within the church to learn by question and answer, by digging and discovering, by being challenged and learning to give an intellectually satisfying answer to objections to the Christian faith.

Thankful for the life, integrity and ministry of @BillyGraham the ‘Good and Faithful’ servant who has shown the world that a leader can humbly follow Jesus & not be corrupted by celebrity, fame, success or even anointing. His life was all about Jesus who he now sees face to face.

One of the most common—and frankly one of the toughest —questions I receive is how to motivate students who are apathetic. How do you make students care? If you are expecting an easy answer, then you might as well click away now. Students are not robots and so we can’t force them to care about anything! But there are a few things I have learned from my experience and research that may help you motivate students who don’t seem to care about spiritual issues:

Throughout the New Testament, one will find early creeds, formulations, and hymns that predate the New Testament itself. These texts are often called “proto-New Testament texts.” Proto-New Testament texts date back to the earliest church from those who were eyewitnesses of Jesus himself. 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 is perhaps the most popular of the proto-New Testament texts as it bears heavily on the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. Concerning 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, Roy Ciampa and Brian Rosner write,

Maybe you’re leading a Bible study tomorrow. Maybe you’re just beginning to dig deeper. It’s good to know that you can always ask Ligonier. For more than forty-five years, Christians have been looking to Ligonier Ministries, the teaching fellowship of R.C. Sproul, for clear and helpful answers to biblical and theological questions. Now you can ask those questions online as they arise, confident that our team will work quickly to provide clear, concise, and trustworthy answers. When you have questions, just ask Ligonier.

Christians today are facing more challenges than ever. The Poached Egg exists to equip Christians to meet those challenges and be more confident in their faith and become more effective witnesses for Christ. If you find these articles and posts useful, please consider partnering with me in 2018 to continue this work that God has laid on my heart. As someone once said, the Gospel is free, but someone has to pay for the plumbing. You can become a monthly partner for just as little as $5 a month (that’s only $60 a year), the price of a gourmet cup of coffee. Special one time gifts are welcome and encouraged as well. Will you help?

“My understanding of what religion means altered,” he explains. “Because when I think about the aim, the purpose of religion, I think it becomes—when you put aside the social institutions that spring up around religions in all their strains and various forms of strands—I believe that the purpose of religion is love and connection, to feel connected to one another and to feel at ease with who we are … a kind of oneness, a kind of wholeness. So, as I began to understand that, this sort of superficial language of religion seemed less relevant.”

Others think that each person has their own truth. I saw an advertisement this past summer at UC Berkeley for voice lessons which give “vocal techniques to ‘free the natural voice,’ combined with gentle spiritual exercises empower you to SPEAK YOUR TRUTH” (emphasis theirs). This has become a popular phrase in our culture and was even used by Oprah Winfrey at the Golden Globes when she said, “What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have” (emphasis mine).

Point Three: Always be willing to learn . There is a great need for learning and growing in the field of apologetics, before you ever get to the point that you can share what you have learned with others. You need to grow in your personal understanding of the truth claims in Scripture. Partly because at this point most aren’t on the level of public debating, but rather we’re just beginning to understand what it means to teach and how to organize an apologetics program. Everyone has to start somewhere, from C.S. Lewis, William Lane Craig, Ravi Zacharias, and even Thomas Aquinas. They all began learning and growing at some point in their relationship with God. Likewise, they all started attaining to be more educated and learned in apologetics. The goal isn’t to be a better arguer, but rather the goal is to first grow more in our personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Then with this we can share the truth.

"Moral Relativism is One of the Defining Characteristics of Gen Z" from @Jonathan_Morrow of @impact360 : https://www.impact360institute.org/articles/moral-relativism-one-defining-characteristics-gen-z/?utm_source … #truth #apologetics

Graham's greater assurances about the love of God transformed his evangelism in his attitude toward sin, social crises, and ecumenism. With the love of God at the center of his message, Graham spoke more often of sin as the condition of all humanity, as opposed to sin as particular transgressions of one kind or another. This distinction crystallized for him as he recognized that God's loving sacrifice of Jesus at the Cross was meant to "deal with sin and not just individual sins." Graham's decreasing emphasis on a gospel of good behavior strengthened his commitment to a social gospel. Make no mistake, Graham never wavered in his primary mission to bring individuals to Christ. But he worried less about—as he preached in 1949—"the sins of the Sunset Strip," and more about social problems, including racism, AIDS, and poverty. Finally, Graham's ecumenical spirit deepened and broadened. He refused to speculate about the fate of non-Christians, and offered that "the love of God is absolute ... and I think he loves everybody regardless of what label they have.

Very good? That’s not how our feelings feel much of the time. In this fallen world, we have been “grieved by various trials” (1 Peter 1:6). Physical pain and weakness can wreak havoc on our feelings. But perhaps most troublesome of all is the sin that grips our emotions. Sin seeks to unite the whole person — mind, will, and emotions — in rebellion against the holy God. Emotions are not the problem, but they do have a sin problem. For this reason, I don’t correct my daughter for being “too emotional”; instead, I try to help her see the sin that has hijacked her emotions.

FYI: I receive your blog posts via email feed. They always seem to take a little longer than others to open in Outlook. This one for some reason took unusually long to display. As I was attempting to forward it I kept getting “(Not responding)” lockups for a few seconds each time. You may have issues with the formatting and the bandwidth required to open it. There always seems to be a delay when scrolling down your emails when I get near the bottom where the Kindle deals are. This has come up in the past for other pastors I have forwarded your emails to including locking their systems up so they asked me to discontinue forwarding them. Someone would have to be a lot more techno-savvy than me to check out the HTML coding in your email as they come from your server to see what causes this. On the other hand when clicking on “display in browswer” for the emails, or accessing the HeadHeartHand web site no issues have been noticed.

The impact of ostracism (being excluded or ignored) on its targets has been extensively explored in the last decades. Ostracism has been found to have adverse effects on targeted individuals physical and mental health. Most research in this field, however, has focused on the immediate and short-term impact on ostracised individuals and has been conducted under laboratory conditions. Utilising a qualitative approach, the current study explored the long-term impact of chronic ostracism in former members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who were excommunicated from their community following a variety of doctrinal transgressions. Moreover, the study explored how ostracised individuals make sense and explain ostracism to themselves. […]

While only God can rightly assess the ripple effect of a person’s life in all the ways it has influence, my own judgment would be that Billy Graham’s greatest impact is the eternal difference he made in leading countless persons, from all over the world, out of destruction into everlasting joy and love. This was his primary mission. “Because God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

William Martin observed that the forces gathered and unleashed at the Berlin, Lausanne, and Amsterdam meetings constitute a third worldwide ecumenical movement, every bit as important as the World Council of Churches and the Roman Catholic Church. The amazing thing about the evangelical movement is that it is sustained not by a single organizational entity, but by multiple parachurch organizations, independent of each other but dreaming a common dream. Graham's genius was his ability to inspire people not to follow him, but to strike out on their own, following Jesus by proclaiming the gospel in their own way; and then to call them together, to inspire and equip thousands more to do the same thing. We may never see his like again. But perhaps—because of his faithfulness in calling, equipping, and sending others to stand up and proclaim, "The Bible says…"—the world won't need another Billy Graham. And he and Moody, whom Graham was sure he'd meet in heaven, can stand together and look on in wonder at what God hath wrought.

Christians today are facing more challenges than ever. The Poached Egg exists to equip Christians to meet those challenges and be more confident in their faith and become more effective witnesses for Christ. If you find these articles and posts useful, please consider partnering with me in 2018 to continue this work that God has laid on my heart. As someone once said, the Gospel is free, but someone has to pay for the plumbing. You can become a monthly partner for just as little as $5 a month (that’s only $60 a year), the price of a gourmet cup of coffee. Special one time gifts are welcome and encouraged as well. Will you help?

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Interesting interview about Billy Graham's relationships with several U.S. Presidents. “America got lucky with Billy Graham...He had an agenda when he walked into the Oval Office. It just wasn't a political one. It was a spiritual one.” https://buff.ly/2ogEREB